run agency for doormen (Gunnebo: the UK’s leading entrance control service provider)

sell packages of “great quotes by great thinkers” to Tweeters

sell begging letters/stories about how you’ve been mugged and need precisely £3.87 to get back to
Sidcup

equine sports masseur

remove Tudorbethan features from houses and modern up the interior (see Times May 11, 2012)

replace Tudorbethan features that have been scraped off

add Tudorbethan features to modern houses

music adviser for cafes and restaurants (produce the mixed CDs)

be assertive on the phone on behalf of others (energy, the council, banks, suppliers of shoddy goods who don’t deliver on time, “you are being held in a queue”, “press six to listen to this menu again” etc etc)

Don’t bother forging old masters, the Chinese do it better and more cheaply in Dafen art village

If you find yourself doing anything interesting or unusual (trying to make it as a standup, languishing in a TB sanatorium, working as a prostitute, nurse, factory hand) keep a detailed diary noting verbatim conversations, what everybody was wearing etc. It will need very little work to turn it into a gripping book like Enter Talking, In My Skin, The Plague and I, One Pair of Feet or The Common Years.

Write a novel using another author’s character(s)

Take a long, discursive, unreadable, unread and forgotten 18th/19th century novel and turn it into a modern scifi drama/detective story.

open boutique restaurant/cinema which screens b/w movies to patrons seated in “pods”

open cinema which screens black and white movies 24/7

oyster farmer with outlet in London

escargot breeder

start a company “helping people back to work” and sell your services to the government.